The approach of excluding the geometry of Computer-Aided Design (CAD)-modeled fasteners, and replacing them with virtual fasteners for purposes of simulation, is both well-known and available in many Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) applications.
Virtual fasteners use the physical properties of the fasteners in the CAD model (e.g., applied load or torque, diameter of head, nut or thread to define their contact areas with non-fastener geometries) to expedite the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) process to provide efficient solutions while making those solutions as realistic as possible.
In many cases, however, users need to manually create and define such virtual fasteners individually. For a model with many fasteners, this manual process may take a long time to complete.
If the CAD model has no such fasteners defined, the user can skip the step of excluding the CAD-modeled fasteners. Without such fastener/connector information, however, an FEA application may not be capable of simulating the connection, thereby failing to provide a solution as described above.
A few techniques exist to massively create virtual fasteners, but each of these techniques has disadvantages. For example, some of the techniques may require substantial manual input of precisely defined parameters by the end user, and the massive creation itself is time consuming. Some techniques that may be tightly integrated with a particular CAD application do not work with imported geometry, and so cannot work with other CAD applications.